Wawa and South Jersey Gas Partnering on Compressed Natural Gas Fueling Station

Celebrating the opening of Wawa’s first compressed natural gas fueling station in Paulsboro, NJ are: Jeff DuBois, president, South Jersey Gas, and Brian Schaller, Wawa’s vice president of fuel supply & retail operations. (Steve Lubetkin Photo/StateBroadcastNews.com)

PAULSBORO , NJ —Wawa and South Jersey Gas are partnering to provide the convenience store chain’s first compressed natural gas fueling station, at the Paulsboro Wawa store, 51 Berkley Road, Paulsboro, NJ. Through the partnership with South Jersey Gas , the Paulsboro location, just off Exit 18 on the southbound side of Interstate 295, is Wawa’s first store chain-wide to offer CNG fueling as an alternative to traditional petroleum-based fuels. Compressed natural gas (methane stored at a high pressure) can be used in place of gasoline and diesel fuel.  In addition to being cleaner burning, CNG vehicles show an average reduction in ozone-forming emissions of 80 percent compared to gasoline vehicles. Wawa stores are located in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and Florida. South Jersey Gas serves more than 300,000 customers in 112 municipalities in Atlantic, Cape May, Cumberland and Salem counties and parts of Burlington, Camden and Gloucester counties. “This project was an opportunity for us to deepen our connection with the community and specifically with South Jersey Gas,” Brian Schaller , Wawa’s vice president of fuel supply & retail operations, tells GlobeSt.com exclusively . “South Jersey Gas brought up the concept of how we could do this together.” The gas utility was seeking a way to gain greater consumer interest in CNG-fueled vehicles, while also broadening its own capability to refuel a fleet of CNG trucks, says Todd Gordon, manager of commercial and industrial sales for South Jersey Gas “With the addition of this station, we now have seven operating public stations in South Jersey,” he says. “We see the infrastructure growing and we see a network growing up and down the Northeast corridor, which is really going to open it up the market to interstate transportation.” State officials who joined Wawa and South Jersey Gas executives to mark the opening of the fueling station had praise for the partnership between the popular retailer and the utility company. “This partnership is one which helps advance New Jersey’s goals and its energy future,” says Richard Mroz , president of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities . “And those goals are to drive down the cost of energy across the board, promote a diverse portfolio of generation, reward energy efficiency and conservation, maintain support for emerging technologies and to capitalize on those technologies in and around the transportation sector.” The CNG fueling location will also raise Paulsboro’s visibility among transportation fleet owners whose trucks and cars patronize the facility, says Paulsboro Mayor Gary Stevenson . “It becomes a better community relationship with Wawa,” he says. “It brings business into Wawa, and they hire residents as their employees. It helps spur development in this area.” Industrial customers say the clean-burning CNG fuel helps them operate with less pollution and reduces their maintenance. “We’re now operating more than 5,100 natural gas collection vehicles across the US and Canada,” says John Hambrose, regional communications manager for Waste Management. “Each year when we take a Diesel truck off the road and replace it with a natural gas vehicle, we eliminate the use of 80,000 gallons of Diesel fuel, eliminate the production of about 24 tons of greenhouse gases, and we lower the maintenance costs on our trucks.”